Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

Robert Mallet

Robert Mallet (1810-1881)

Robert Mallet, an Irishman born in 1810 at Ryders Row, off Capel Street, Dublin, is known as the father of seismology from experiments he carried out on Killiney Beach, County Dublin, to examine the velocities of energy passing through various materials including rocks. The experiments involved the detonation of kegs of gun powder buried in the sand and measuring the travel times of the shock waves at a distance of 0.5 miles. This was in fact the first “controlled source” seismological experiment ever to be performed in Ireland or anywhere else in the world. For more reading about the life of Robert Mallet please click here.

The BBC Coast Program invited the Geophysics Section to provide technical seismological support for the recreation of the Killiney Beach experiments that were carried out by Robert Mallet in October 1849. The programme will include a recording of the detonation of a small charge on the beach and its resulting shock wave registered by the DIAS data recorder. The program is due to be aired by the BBC sometime in Spring 2009.

Mallet graduated from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) with a degree in Natural Science in 1830 and went on to work in his fathers iron foundry in Capel Street, Dublin City, where he helped manufacture among other things, the very characteristic iron railings that surround Trinity College and which bear his family name at the base. A very active and prolific investigator in many branches of engineering and natural science, Mallet became interested in the phenomena of earthquakes and contributed many papers on the topic to Royal Irish Academy (RIA), and Royal Society of London (RSL).

He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy at the very early age of 22 in 1832. He enrolled in the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1835 which helped finance much of Mallet’s research in seismology.

On the 16th December, 1857, the area around Padula, Southern Italy, was devastated by a very strong earthquake in which 11,000 people were killed. At that time this earthquake was the 3rd largest known quake in the world and was reckoned to be 7.00 on the Richter Scale. Robert Mallet, with letters of support from Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, petitioned the Royal Society of London and received a grant of 150 pounds sterling to go to Padula and record first hand the devastation that had occurred. The resulting report was presented to the RSL as the “Report on the Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857”. This was a major scientific work and made great use of the latest research tool of photography to record the devastation caused by the earthquake.

DIAS Geophysics are partners within the @eurovolc H2020 project where the first annual meeting occurred this week at the Volcano Observatory of the Azores Islands at the University of Azores in Ponta Delgada #eurovolc

With support from the @GeolSurvIE , €1.5m is being invested to expand and upgrade the Irish National Seismic Network (insn.ie) New funding will result in more stations, greater coverage & more accurate recording of earthquakes in Ireland. tinyurl.com/yb6ho2cp

Dr. Duygu Kiyan recently presented her work at the AGU Meeting in Washington, USA. Along with her colleagues, she is imaging Ireland's lithosphere using legacy and newly acquired magnetotelluric data across Ireland. @iCRAGcentre@DIAS_Dublin@GeolSurvIE@tcdastro

"Forecasting the Unpredictable: Earthquake science in a crowded world" by Prof. John McCloskey is DIAS's 2018 Statutory Public Lecture of the School of Cosmic Physics. Schrodinger Theatre, School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, Wednesday Dec 12th at 18:30. Admission is free!

The field season of the DIAS led HERSK project started last week when Icelandic Met Office engineers transported seismic gear with skidoos onto Hekla volcano. The HEkla Real-time Seimic networK project
is funded by the GSI shortcall program and led by Martin Möllhoff at DIAS.

This inflation has critically stressed the rocks in the volcano, such that small local earthquakes are being triggered by the tiny ground shaking from large distant earthquakes in the surrounding Pacific ‘ring of fire’.

Geophysicists from DIAS have recently assisted the University of Edinburgh & the Instituto Geofisico at the Escuela Politecnica Nacional (IGEPN), deploy a network of seismometers at Sierra Negra, a large basaltic volcano in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.

#DIASDublin welcomed Mr. Yukiya Amano, DG of the International Atomic Energy Agency @iaeaorg today where, as a guest of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, he gave a keynote address on "IAEA: Atoms for Peace and Development". Retweeted by
DIAS Geophysics